How to Keep Hold of 120,000 Words—or, How to Work With a Manuscript in Word

You’ve written the first draft of a novel in Microsoft Word! You should congratulate yourself; it’s a huge achievement. But your manuscript is one hundred twenty thousand words long, and now it’s time to edit. How are you supposed to hold all those words in your head? Your novel is a giant squid that slips out of your grasp as soon as you think you’ve got it contained. Where in this unwieldy animal did your protagonist sneeze for the first time? When did you last mention that minor character? And how many times have you used the word tentacle?

Then you discover the Navigation Pane. You:

1. Open your work in progress (WIP) in Word
2. Click the View tab
3. Tick the box next to Navigation Pane

A column called Navigation opens on the left-hand side. In the column under Headings you’ll hopefully see a list of all the headings in your WIP, probably Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and so on. (Note: You’ll see them only if you’ve used Word’s Styles Pane, found under the Home tab, to format your book’s sections—maybe you’ve used the Style called Heading 1 for the title of your novel and the Style, Heading 2, for the chapter headings. Your headings won’t show in the Navigation column if you’ve manually made them bold or increased their font size yourself. But even if you haven’t applied Styles when you started writing, you can do it retrospectively.)

Now, in your WIP, you rewrite your chapter headings into mini descriptions of what happens in each chapter. So instead of “Chapter 15” you write something like: “15 – The giant squid swallows the boat.” And suddenly this is what appears in the Navigation column, and you know at a glance what happens in that chapter. Yes, it’s a bit of work since you’ve got forty chapters, but you know it’ll be worth it.

And you decide to go further, giving each scene a subheading (using, say, the Style called Subtitle), which describes the scene’s action, and these will appear under each chapter heading in the Navigation column.

For a moment you wonder if your time doing all this was well spent or if in fact you’ve simply found another way to procrastinate and avoid confronting the squid. But when you look at the manuscript, you realize:

Now you know at a glance what happens in every chapter of your WIP (and maybe every scene).

Now you can hop around your WIP with one click, rather than having to scroll through pages of text.

Now you can move a whole chapter or scene and all its text to a different position in your WIP by hovering over it, clicking, then dragging a heading in the Navigation column to a different position. 

Now you can find a word or phrase in your WIP and jump straight to it. Type the word or phrase into the Search document box in the Navigation column and every instance will be highlighted. Use Results to see each use in context, and the up and down arrows to jump from one instance to the next. (This is very useful when editing, if you know you use a particular word or phrase too often.)

Now, hopefully, that squid isn’t quite so slippery.  

Claire Fuller is the author of five novels, all published by Tin House/Zando and translated into more than twenty languages. Her latest, The Memory of Animals, was published in 2023; her previous, Unsettled Ground, won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Find her online at clairefuller.co.uk or on Instagram, @writerclairefuller.